weak convergence (…) in ABC

Samuel Soubeyrand and Eric Haon-Lasportes recently published a paper in Statistics and Probability Letters that has some common features with the ABC consistency paper we wrote a few months ago with David Frazier and Gael Martin. And to the recent Li and Fearnhead paper on the asymptotic normality of the ABC distribution. Their approach is however based on a Bernstein-von Mises [CLT] theorem for the MLE or a pseudo-MLE. They assume that the density of this estimator is asymptotically equivalent to a Normal density, in which case the true posterior conditional on the estimator is also asymptotically equivalent to a Normal density centred at the (p)MLE. Which also makes the ABC distribution normal when both the sample size grows to infinity and the tolerance decreases to zero. Which is not completely unexpected. However, in complex settings, establishing the asymptotic normality of the (p)MLE may prove a formidable or even impossible task.